It is Oligarchy. [View all]

[HomerRamone]

http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2014-06-13/letters-at-3am-snyder-r-us/

• Employ people in mass entities (Walmart, McDonald's) that exist now only for the purpose of moving the elements on which the financial system rests – the goods, services, and resources that are the excuse for the stocks, bonds, and speculative enterprises that make the really big money.

• Pay the majority of employees just enough to function as they move your necessary elements, while you indenture them through a system of credit that they are taught is beneficial. Debt is the key to keeping them in their place – anxious, insecure, and without obvious means to change anything.

• Gradually arrange things so that almost all the money you pay them is returned to the Oligarchy through one or another of their shopping and financial choices. (The people buy more cheaply than was possible in classic entrepreneurial capitalism, but their money leaves town. In entrepreneurial capitalism, the idea is that money spent on basic goods, services, and resources ultimately benefited the community as a whole; in oligarchic capitalism, money disappears. Oligarchy is a system by which all money is sucked from the bottom up to the top 10%, 1%, and .01%. It is not reinvested in any community.)

• Everything gets cheaper except what is absolutely needed: food, shelter, transportation, education, health care, and the cost of election to positions of power. Those prices inflate wildly, without pause and without reason.

• Vote for Republicans, and you get a Walmart government: Workers are treated brutally, all the money disappears, and the people have no say. Vote for Democrats, you get a Target government: Workers are treated better, almost all the money disappears, and, at the end of the day, little changes...

Let's face it, most of you will go placidly along, mouthing any dodge that relieves you of responsibility for your role in history. (I don't mean to be nasty, but true is true.) For the few of you, the problem is how to address this. I don't know the second step, but I know the first: Speak of it as what it is. Goddamnit, speak of it. Speak of it as what it is. It is Oligarchy.